


First Kick I Took Was When I Hit The Ground

by inlovewithnight



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-10
Updated: 2010-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:08:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>John Sheppard backstory, written early in the series and therefore thoroughly contradicted by canon.</p>
    </blockquote>





	First Kick I Took Was When I Hit The Ground

**Author's Note:**

> John Sheppard backstory, written early in the series and therefore thoroughly contradicted by canon.

_Smartass._

Uncle Keith is sober tonight, but it doesn't matter. He would say _smartass_ in exactly the same way, with exactly the same indifference, if he was drunk.

John slumps down lower on the couch, staring blankly at the TV. The evening news. Why bother, nothing ever happens out here.

"I'm going to do my homework."

Uncle Keith glances in John's direction, but his eyes never quite find his nephew. John doesn't wait.

He has to go through the back sitting room to get to the stairs. Aunt Trish is playing cards with the next-door neighbor. Mrs. Watson looks up and smiles. Aunt Trish lights another cigarette.

"Why, hello, Johnny," Mrs. Watson says. "How are you tonight?"

"Just fine, Mrs. Watson," John says, smiling wide, because in addition to being a smartass he is a nice young man. "Just going to do my homework. Math test tomorrow."

"Oh, yes, my Eric told me that. Study hard, now."

John keeps smiling, keeps smiling. Eric Watson could study for six hundred years and still fail that test. "Night, Aunt Trish."

"Hmm." She frowns at her cards. "Make sure you turn the light on the stairs off."

"Yes, ma'am." He keeps his smile on until he's halfway up the stairs, just in case Mrs. Watson is looking. _Such a nice young man. You've done well with him, Trish._

There is no homework, at least none that can't be done on the bus in the morning. He flops down on his back on the bed, looks up at the ceiling. He drew the constellations up there with a ballpoint pen when he was fourteen, standing on a chair and tilting his head back until he was dizzy. The ink's faded a little, but he can still see. He wanted to be an astronaut, then. Not even—he wanted to be a starship captain. Han Solo.

If he rolls onto his side, he'll be able to see the dresser, the desk, the window. The hole in the wall he made throwing a baseball when he was ten. The picture in a plastic frame that's hung in the same spot since the day he got here. Still hanging at a level for an eight-year-old to see. A chubby kid with wild dark hair, his dad, and a plane.

John stretches his legs off the end of the bed, rolls his head against the pillow, breathes in and out through his nose and thinks about nothing. He's hungry, all of a sudden. He could go back down to the kitchen and find something. Aunt Trish would look startled if she turned around and he was there. He's lived with them almost ten goddamn years and every time he comes around a corner they're still surprised to see him.

Colonel Russell D. Sheppard's will left his brother Keith a '63 Ford pickup, the contents of his bank account, and custody of his kid. The pickup was totaled in the wreck that shuffled the Colonel off this mortal coil. The bank account just about covered the assorted debts owed and the Greyhound tickets from Kansas. Keith and Patricia had to keep the kid.  
***  
"You coming home after school?" Uncle Keith asks, frowning at the coffee pot.

"No, sir. Game tonight." John made the coffee this morning, and he is aware that it tastes like crap, but Uncle Keith shrugs it off pretty quickly.

"You going to play?"

"I don't know." John is the second-string kicker, and he gets called in maybe one game in three. He could've stayed on junior varsity and started every week, but being there for the big game on Friday night, even just catching the edge of that buzz, is worth it. He can pretend he's out there, and grab the little moments when they come.

"Huh." Uncle Keith will be there whether John plays or rides the bench or takes the first bus out of town that afternoon. The game is the only thing tonight. Even Aunt Trish will be there, chain-smoking in the corner of the stands with all her friends who once were cheerleaders.

"You want a ride in?" Uncle Keith asks abruptly, putting his coffee cup in the sink. "I'm going now."

John blinks, remembers the homework he was going to do on the bus, pushes the thought aside. He'll find a way to get it done on the fly. "Sure. Let me get my stuff."

The unhappy rattle and whine of the truck's engine is drowned out by Johnny Cash wailing from the cassette player. John spends a decent chunk of life sitting to one side of his uncle, and he only ever glances over and catches him smiling if Cash or football is filling up the silence.

"Team having a party tonight?" Uncle Keith asks suddenly, running the heel of his hand back and forth over the steering wheel.

"Yeah." The same party that's been going on since Keith played for the school, and probably before. Tradition. "It's at Steve's."

"Don't ride with anybody who's been drinking."

"No, sir."

"And be careful with the girls." He eases the truck through a turn, eyes fixed through the windshield on something distant. "If you're anything like your dad, you don't want to get stuck in this town forever."  
***  
John is working on a physics project. It's about football--kicking field goals. The theory behind it is cool and precise, and he marks it out on sheets of paper with firm pencil marks. He probably doesn't have to work this hard; Mr. Whitman will give John an A even if he turns in something based on the assumption that gravity and friction have both been annulled. John runs track in the spring, to keep in shape for football, and Mr. Whitman is the track coach. It's not hard to see how it all works out, and he uses it to his advantage sometimes, but he likes physics and he likes football and he wants to get this right.

Quick small marks of pencil on paper, vectors and angles and force necessary to put the ball through the uprights from _here_ or _here_ or _there_ on the field. Graphite smudges dark across the paper and his fingers. The numbers are cool and pure and unquestionable, the way the actual game out on the field is not.

He could break it all down into numbers--where he'll go after this town, what he'll do--and it won't tell him who he'll be. The guidance counselor has a whole file of numbers on him. All of what she calls his _potential_, quantified. They won't mean anything on the field, either.

He erases the smudges and double-checks the numbers, finishing just as the bell rings. The plan might as well be perfect, even if he'll never make it come true.  
***  
The other kicker, Bob, has a car, and he and John slip off campus for lunch. It's against the rules, but nobody cares-- they're good kids and what does it really hurt? John's noticed that doing what he wants to do very rarely hurts anything except people who like rules better than people.

Bob has been playing the same tape of of _Born in the USA_ in his car since it came out in June, and John hasn't had to buy a copy since he's learned the damn thing by heart. "Glory Days" starts up as they pull back into the parking lot, and the idea that there are people in the world who pine for high school for the rest of their lives makes John shake his head. Springsteen was on to something when it came to _"learned more from a three-minute record than we ever did in school"_, but he's got his ideas of glory all wrong.

They slip back inside ten minutes before lunch is over, and John realizes that they've missed recruiter day. Men in sharply-pressed uniforms of the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force sit behind tables in the lobby, with the Coast Guard over in the far corner like the alien ambassador it is in the middle of Kansas.

Army and Air Force make eye contact with John at the same time, smiling big and beckoning him over. John hesitates.

The military's the fastest way out of this town. It worked for his dad, and it'll work for him. The dirty little secret of the Services is that they all have planes. Any one of them can get him out of here, and any one of them can make him fly.

Army guy's got a stack of brochures and a handful of keychains spread out on his table. Air Force guy has...pencils. A nice rubber-band-bound bundle of #2s, stamped with "USAF" and the outline of a plane. John has a math test in two hours, and wore his pencil down pretty bad in physics that morning.

He walks over to the table and looks the guy in the eye. "Go ahead and sell me."  
***  
They win the game--it isn't close but it isn't a blowout, either, just a good game--and that means the party at Steve's house doesn't have the sullen or angry edge it gets after a loss. Nobody gets in a fight, and none of the girls end up crying. Mike tries to jump over the bonfire like he does win _or_ lose, because he is a dumb fuck and John won't be surprised a bit if he gets himself killed one day. Mike's friends give him another beer or two and that's enough to end the show and slow old Mikey down.

John is struck by the thought, as he is more and more these days, that he cannot stand these people. He isn't of this place; he doesn't have earth in his blood the way they do. Maybe it would be nice to have roots like that, to feel like there was a place where you belonged, but he would never want that place to be _here_. Uncle Keith was right: he's like his dad, at least in wanting to get out.

He's a nice guy and their buddy and _Hey Johnny, Hey Shep, man, have a beer!_ and if somebody told him that he would never see any of them again, he wouldn't flinch. They're friends in theory, the way that Uncle Keith and Aunt Trish are family in theory, the way that file folder in the counselor's office lays out his theoretical potential.

He walks away from the bonfire after a while, out into the cornfield, a bottle loose in his fingers and his eyes on the stars. He thinks that he'll probably always want to find places like this, where he can stand at a point in the center of a great flat sameness and be surrounded by the sky.


End file.
